Nyack musician has worked with David Bowie, Barbra Streisand and Philip Glass

Martha Mooke remembers what convinced her to start playing an electro-acoustic viola.

Just a few years after taking up the conventional viola in grade school, "I had my mind expanded by listening to Jean-Luc Ponty and Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet."

Hearing those two pioneering electric violinists and the genre-busting modern string quartet changed everything. Mooke was determined to find a way to adapt their cutting-edge ideas to her beloved viola.

It led her into a remarkable career that has moved fluidly among musical genres and musicians ranging from major pop stars like David Bowie, Phish's Trey Anastasio, and Barbra Streisand to leading modernist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

"I absolutely love it — I love having the versatility," she says.

She cited a recent whirlwind week as an example of her range.

"I was playing with the American Composers Orchestra, premiering new works down at the World Financial Center. Then, the next day I was on a plane to Sedona [Arizona], playing a concert of my own music. I came back to do a rehearsal with the Teatro Grattacielo of an obscure Italian opera, and ended the week playing at Madison Square Garden with Blur."

Mooke, a 15-year Nyack resident, admits that the scope of her work can make her hard to pin down as an artist.

On a mid-November trip to Cuba, Mooke demonstrated her art for audiences that had little previous exposure to her specialty in electro-acoustic viola.

Mooke presented her groundbreaking work and techniques at the invitation of the Laboratorio Nacional de Música Electroacústica in a workshop for young string players and a free public concert.

"It was a very magical experience," she says, explaining the pleasure she got from exposing her Cuban audience to new ideas about music. "My philosophy is you don't know what your missing until you know what you've been missing."

It's all part of her latest project, which centers on her new album titled "No Ordinary Window."

The title has multiple meanings, she says, because a window can be "something you look out through, a window that looks in, a window to the soul, a window of opportunity, a window as a reflection."

That ambiguity serves Mooke's desire to encourage people to experience music "not only with their ears but through their other senses as well, and for their imaginations to be sparked by the sounds that I'm creating and by the environment."

"The whole philosophy of what I do in my workshops and my concerts is to get the audience more involved, as if it's interactive," she says.

At the core of the project is an album of five compositions, ranging from just over 7 minutes long to nearly 17 minutes. They are rhythmic, meditative soundscapes that explore the potential of her instrument.

10 things you might not know about Martha Mooke

1. Born in Manhattan, Mooke was raised in the Bronx and Staten Island, where she graduated from Tottenville High School.

2. She chose to play the viola in elementary school because "most everybody wanted to play the violin."

3. Mooke and her sister, Susan, "used to play guitar and sing together," but Susan became a writer, which is why I ask her to proofread everything I write."

4. She earned her college degree in music performance from SUNY Albany.

5. Her first electro-acoustic instrument was a violin, not a viola. It was a five-string version blue Barcus Berry violin just like the one Jean-Luc Ponty held on the cover of his 1979 album "A Taste for Passion."

6. She worked in the box office of Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after college.

7. When she's not traveling for her work, Nyack's Art Café is a favorite spot. "I love to sit outside and have my chai latte," she says.

8. Working with David Bowie for the first time was one of the most memorable moments of her career, Mooke says. It was at the 2002 Tibet House benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. "We were playing 'Heroes,' and I was pinching myself," she says.

9. One of her next projects has Mooke working with Rahzel, a master beatboxer.

10. "On all my pants that have belt loops I wear a safety pin on the first loop nearest my right pocket," she says.